快猫短视频

PLANS to vaccinate all 2.4 million US military personnel against anthrax are
in fresh trouble. Research notes from a crucial test of the vaccine in monkeys
suggest that, while jabs may keep soldiers alive after an anthrax attack, they
will become too sick to fight. This follows a damning report earlier this year,
in which Congress called the plan a 鈥渕edical Maginot Line鈥�
(快猫短视频, 26 February, p 5).
For most US troops, the problem is academic
anyway, as the army has run out of vaccine.

George Robertson of BioReliance in Rockport, Maryland, a former vaccine
researcher, has obtained lab records from monkey tests carried out in 1991 at
the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick,
Maryland. In the study, rhesus monkeys were given a vaccine similar to the one
used for the US troops, and then inhaled large doses of anthrax spores. Anthrax
is too dangerous for this test to be carried out in humans.

The notes record that although the monkeys survived, they became sick for up
to two weeks afterwards. Sick soldiers could be more of a burden on defending
forces than dead ones.

鈥淚鈥檇 rather be vaccinated if I was facing anthrax attack,鈥� says anthrax
expert Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. 鈥淏ut if
you inhale enough spores nothing can save you.鈥�

Soldiers may not get the choice. BioPort of Lansing, Michigan, the sole
producer of the anthrax vaccine in the US, stopped making it after failing
safety tests last December, and stocks have dwindled. Only 57 000 troops have so
far got all four initial injections.